Always eat dinner before playing a Cosmo D game – that’s what I’ve learned. Among their shared oddities is a weird pizza-centricity, and even though the pizzas have largely been shown as low-ish resolution discs, they always spark a strong craving. Playing Moves of the Diamond Hand, Off-Peak, and Tales from Off-Peak City Vol. 1 have all resulted in me ordering pizza. The pizza joints in this town aren’t all that special. Not like Pepi’s in Kitchener or Gabriel’s in Ottawa. Or Caetano’s, for that matter.

Pizza is everywhere in the Cosmo D anthology, but it’s most prevalent in Tales from Off-Peak City Vol 1., the third-ish game in the series. So, full warning, either eat your dinner before playing it or prepare to order a pie.

PIZZA FOR BREAKFAST

Tales from Off-Peek City Vol. 1 starts similar to how The Norwood Suite did. You’re dropped off at a place in the city by some shady characters (who appeared in the previous game). This time, you have more of a defined goal: find Caetano’s famous saxophone. This time, you’re at the intersection of July and Yam, and Caetano’s pizza shop is right on the corner. Your taskmasters provide you with the best resume ever written, and your first goal is to apply for a job making delicious pizza to try and get closer to the man himself.

Making pizza is actually a thing in Tales from Off-Peek City Vol. 1. You get the job suspiciously quickly, then make your first pie. This involves rolling the dough, sprinkling on any variety of ingredients, then setting it to cook. The last stage of the journey has you delivering it.

You’re not given the customer’s preferences. They don’t make an order saying they want double cheese and pepperoni. Instead, you just free-form it. Pizza making is art, so go feral. Smother it with a pillow of cheese. Your only obstacle is your imagination and the game’s physics engine.

There doesn’t seem to be a wrong way to do it, either. Customers will comment on the toppings, often just congratulating you on being such a visionary, but I’m not sure it affects the tip you get. Certainly, it affects what the characters say, so if there’s any challenge in the pizza baking, it’s trying to get the absolute best reaction, which is sort of what art is all about. That’s pretty devious messaging, so well played.

PIZZA ROMANTIC

Despite the intricate pizza mechanics, Tales from Off-Peak City Vol. 1 is still largely a walking sim. It’s similarly about vibes and doesn’t present anything challenging. There are adventure-style puzzles to solve, but they tend to be pretty basic and to the point. Nothing that’s going to cook your noodle.

The corner of Yam and July also doesn’t feel quite as atmospheric as Norwood Suite, but I’d argue that if Norwood Suite was about the location, Tales from Off-Peak City is about the characters. You find yourself slipping into the narrative of a neighbourhood that has fallen to pieces in the shadow of Human Resources Horizons. The company has a gigantic factory that apparently once employed basically everyone in the area, but has since closed itself off but still operates in sinister secret. Central to this is Big Mo, the landlord for most of the people in the neighbourhood, who is constantly flanked by big, identical thugs.

Tales from Off-Peak City has a more defined mechanic around conversing with characters or just eavesdropping. If you stand back far enough, you can listen into conversation, but once you approach them, they start including you. In this way, you get a lot of insight into what’s going on. And there’s a lot. Like Norwood Suite you spend a lot of time with folks whose lives have been disrupted by the sinister factory and learn just how they’re coping.

THE CHEESE FANTASIA

It’s worth noting that Tales from Off-Peak City is really wrapped in Cosmo D’s overarching plotline. Caetano himself was one of the musicians who worked with Norwood, and a lot of threads left lingering from The Norwood Suite are either pulled further or wrapped up. That doesn’t really mean you need to have played The Norwood Suite first, but you maybe should. It lends significance to things that come up here. It is also chronologically set after that game. And Off-Peak, for that matter.

If there’s one downside to Tales from Off-Peak City Vol. 1, it’s that the conclusion is very sudden. Overall, it’s a rather short game. I’m not sure if The Norwood Suite is factually a longer game, but it feels longer. Not that length is really a major factor in what makes a game like this great, but the issue is more that it feels like there’s still gas in the tank when it finally putters out. Cosmo D seemed to have additional delivery jobs planned for later content updates, but only one seems to have come to fruition before he moved on. Even still, I don’t think additional jobs are going to make much of a difference when the issue is that the narrative arc seems to stop when it has momentum.

Whatever, I guess. It’s vibes we’re looking for. And Tales from Off-Peak City Vol 1. has them in spades. Typical for Cosmo D, its visuals are dense, and many of its scenes feel set up in a way that demands screenshots be taken. He even threw in an in-game camera with different types of film to experiment with.

Overall, it’s a worthy entry in Cosmo D’s Off-Peak anthology. On this playthrough, I found myself preferring The Norwood Suite, but it’s not like it’s a stretch to play and enjoy both. Tales from Off-Peak City contains all the same goodness, and I’d go as far as saying the characters and narrative are more interesting. While his world is filled with abstract ridiculousness, Cosmo D still knows how to tell a human story without needing to make a whole lot of sense.

The magic of Cosmo D is in the way he can suck you into an unbelievable world and make it feel like home. My issue with the length could entirely be that I just don’t want to leave. I want to keep existing in these places, and when it’s time for it to end, it always feels too early. That’s the mark of a meaningful game.

7/10

This review was conducted using a digital Steam version of the game. It was paid for by the author.